


The Legacy Of Clement Attlee

by Urbenmyth



Series: Tales Beyond The Archives [5]
Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Bet this is the first ever fic about Clement Attlee, Body Horror, Clement Attlee - Freeform, Gen, god I hope agricultural history is a draw for people, the boneturners tale
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-13
Updated: 2020-10-13
Packaged: 2021-03-07 18:13:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 655
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26981968
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Urbenmyth/pseuds/Urbenmyth
Summary: Smirke saw the ascension of the Flesh, but he never saw its birth.Here is the story of the man who did.
Series: Tales Beyond The Archives [5]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1965088
Comments: 3
Kudos: 26





	The Legacy Of Clement Attlee

Few people bother to study Clement Attlee, British prime minister from 1945 to 1951.  


While he was certainly considered a perfectly competent prime minister by peers and historians alike, he simply lacked either the stunning achievements or catastrophic failures needed to live on in popular culture. Only history buffs are likely to remember The Right Honorable Earl Attlee in any great detail.

And even those history buffs might be forgiven for not starting with the Agriculture Act of 1947 when discussing him. Passed by Attlee’s government, it was a boring enough bill. It increased subsidies for farmers, set up financial support for struggling farms and otherwise helped stabilize a post-war economy in a number of ways you don't care about.

This allowed much more financial security for farmers, and by extension massive increases in production. This had a number of agricultural knock-on effects, only one of which matters to our story. Within 20 years of this bill being passed, the first factory farms had been built.

This is, so far, bland historical fact. An achievement, certainly, but not one many would care about.  


That is what is officially recorded.

What is not recorded, at least not in any book you or I will ever read, was the stories from before, whispered in the green revolution. A farm that produced human meat, no matter what creature was slaughtered. A butcher who tore off his own face with shards of mirror, screaming only that it was “hideous”. A collection of farmhands who fed on each other when work was slow, their bodies regrowing with each dawn.  


But these were brief snippets. Fleeting bursts of fear. The Flesh could be _seen_ , but it was not _born_ yet. There were still only 13 entities at this point. The new god needed something else to push it over.

In signing a bland, routine farming bill, Clement Attlee gave it that push.

While the mundane horrors of the new factory farms are well known, there are other horrors never put to paper. The twitching creatures that climbed from production lines, or the whispers heard in the bone and muscle of those workers, or the no-longer-human bodies found near the areas after dark? They will not be mentioned in any history books. Great effort has been taken to ensure that.

When a never-written book called the Boneturner's Tale was found in the office of a Factory Manager, his later disappearance was considered unsolved and unrelated. When a hundred head of cattle were found with gaping maws and a taste for human meat, it was called a disease outbreak and covered up. When a man fed his family into a meat grinder after eating the produce from these new farms, it was deemed simple murder, and the grinder removed.

And when a new, high-tech slaughterhouse was found with everything inside- men, livestock, equipment and all- merged into one bloody mass of muscle, proclaiming its own birth in gurgling shrieks? _That_ was certainly never recorded.

It was burnt to the ground, its name bureaucratically erased. There were no witnesses left alive to silence.  


Clement Attlee died not 2 years after the first factory farms took up production. The official records are a peaceful death from pneumonia, typical for an old man. A simple enough death for a simple enough man.  


This is not the case.

As I have said, Clement Attlee is not a famous figure. There are few books written about him, and few in depth studies of his legacy. But among both his detractors and supporters, one picture emerged. He was a man known for his deep sense of responsibility in both his political and personal life.  A man who would never shirk the consequences of his actions.

In short, when the child he had birthed came to see its father?

He was not the type to flee or hide or fight

He was a man who would have let it in.


End file.
